Why rush kindergarten?

By Anjetta McQueen
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Devi Knaster knows her letters, can count to 10, and is no longer too shy to speak to adults or play with other children. Plus, she’s developed the social skills her mother felt she needed for the first year of more than a decade of school.

Devi, a 5-year-old who spent an extra year in preschool, is ready for the rigors of kindergarten.

‘‘She probably would have been fine had we forced her into kindergarten early,’’ said Devi’s mom, Barbara Knaster, a computer consultant from Campbell, Calif. ‘‘Now I know she’s really ready. She’s much more self-confident.’’

This fall, thousands more children will shelve their lunchboxes. In reference to a sports term for a team athlete not quite ready for games, roughly 9 percent of young children each year are ‘‘red-shirted’’ for kindergarten. Their school careers are either delayed by state laws raising the age of kindergarten enrollment or by parents holding their children out until they feel they’ve matured.

As kindergarten gets increasingly academic, with children being encouraged to read sooner and better, the debate over red-shirting intensifies.

‘‘Parents really struggle over that,’’ said Heidi Inouye-Steiner, president of the California Council of Parent Participation Nursery Schools, Inc. ‘‘What if the kids are ready and you hold them back? What if you send them and they’re not ready? It’s a very tough call for parents.’’

The conventional wisdom has been that children should stay out if they’ve barely made the cutoff age or if parents doubt they’re ready. But more educators armed with new research say anxious lawmakers and parents should be careful: sometimes children will do better if they immediately get school-based attention to their learning and emotional development.

‘‘Some people talk about giving children the gift of time,’’ said Dan Miller, an associate professor who directs the school psychology graduate training programs at Texas Woman’s University, in Denton. ‘‘If an at-risk child stays at home and comes to you a year later, he or she may be even more at risk."

‘‘A child placed in a preschool program is at least getting socialization skills,’’ said Miller.

Early-childhood experts can’t agree on when children should start kindergarten – a German program of developmental play, song and stories brought here in 1856. It was once standard practice to enroll new kindergartners in September as long as they were going to be 5 by December or January. This brought many 4-year-olds straight from preschool, or from home. Even if they could count, they might not be able to sit still or follow directions.

Some parents say they prefer to use the rules as guides; not mandates.

Researchers argue there’s just not enough information to determine which way is better.

‘‘Redshirting for kindergarten or retention in the early grades should not be widely promoted or endorsed until we know more,’’ said University of Wisconsin-Madison education professor Elizabeth Graue, who helped study 8,500 Wisconsin youngsters.

The results appear mixed. She and her colleagues found that for students held out a year had as much self-esteem as other children but had more behavior problems. Red-shirted children were less likely to need special education services or other extra help, but they didn’t make any better grades than their peers.

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